The Battle For Tahrir Square

On February 2 and 3, 2011, pro-Mubarak supporters attacked thousands of protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square. For nearly 18 hours straight, I live-tweeted over 1,000 eyewitness reports I collected from my sources participating in the battle. This is an account of how it happened.

On the night of February 1, Cairo was on a knife’s edge. The
deaths of so many protesters on January 28 had shaken the public’s confidence,
leading to larger demonstrations around the country. And for three days running,
the Egyptian government had taken the dramatic step of shutting down the
Internet, hoping to avoid a repeat of Tunisia.

The move backfired. Not only did protesters find ways of
getting around the shutdown, it caused countless other Egyptians to leave their
homes and gather with their neighbors to find out what was going on. People who
might not otherwise go onto the streets were now doing just that.

As tens of thousands of protesters got ready to spend
another night in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Mubarak gave a speech on live
television. While he acknowledged the protesters were peaceful, he said they were
being exploited by people who wanted to cause violence. He promised to step
down at the end of his term, but that would be later in the year; he’d remain
in power for now. Mubarak ended the speech by insisting that he would “die on
Egyptian soil.”

In the early morning hours of February 2, groups of Mubarak
supporters began to rally outside Tahrir Square. One group that arrived on
motorcycles chanted, "With our blood and our souls, we will defend Hosni
Mubarak."

Just past 3am local time, New York Times commentator
Nicholas Kristof returned from a visit to Tahrir and tweeted about the tension
there.

Up the road from Tahrir, along the east bank of the Nile at
Egyptian state TV headquarters, CNN’s Ben Wedeman observed another group of
Mubarak supporters. They looked like they were itching for a confrontation.

As I went to bed, I worried I’d wake up hearing about
reports of assaults on protesters. Never would I have imagined that it would escalate
into a siege.

-------

By the time I got online the next morning, it was just past
afternoon prayers in Cairo. Typically, things would be relatively quiet each
day until afternoon prayers, when thousands of people would assemble. Once the
prayers ended, anything was possible. On this particular day, it quickly turned
into chaos.

Mobs brought in on buses? Machetes and clubs? Someone with close connections to Mubarak - if
not Mubarak himself - had apparently unleashed the hounds.

As I scrolled through my Twitter stream, the situation
around Tahrir Square came into focus. Mahmoud Salem, a widely-read Egyptian blogger
who goes by the name @sandmonkey, sized up the pro-Mubarak crowd:

I went to Al Jazeera’s website, hoping they’d be streaming
live coverage. After several failed attempts to connect, the stream began to
play. The first thing I saw was a swarm of men on horseback, some of them armed
with batons and what appeared to be swords, charging up one of the streets
leading into Tahrir Square.

“It is an intense battle here,” an Al Jazeera reporter said.
“Honestly to God, I thought I’d never see camels charging.”

Mubarak thugs were making a cavalry charge – and a medieval
one at that. Horses weren’t exactly an unusual site in Cairo, but typically
they were hauling carts of metal scraps or whatever, not intentionally careening
into pedestrians. And as for camels, Cairo isn’t exactly an Arabian Nights fantasy
come to life. The closest camels were nearly an hour away southwest in Giza,
waiting for hordes of tourists to mount them for overpriced photos in front of
the pyramids.

My local contacts seemed about as shocked as I was.
@WaelAbbas, one of the best-known bloggers in the region, couldn’t believe what
he was witnessing:

IshaniMehtaThis is the new-age collaborative Avatar of classic journalistic brilliance. I am a fan. I love how the humanity, resilience, agency and bravery of the...This is the new-age collaborative Avatar of classic journalistic brilliance. I am a fan. I love how the humanity, resilience, agency and bravery of the revolutionaries has been preserved in this piecemore2013-01-11T02:58:17.744Z